2004 Student Commencement Address
Given on May 29, 2004

by Brett Masters '04

So I'm standing in a gas station between here and Holyoke waiting for the girl behind the counter to ring up my Snickers bar so I can ask her for directions to Deerfield. She has long painted nails that gave her hand the quality of a paw. Little American flags painted in miraculous miniature on each finger. Watching her claw at the change on the counter, I am impatient and vaguely intimidated. With the big hair and those damned human claws, she's a Kodiak.

Next she will attempt the buttons on the cash register. She smacks her gum and I smile, docilely, wondering if the guy behind me might mercifully hold the place up; at least to get things moving. In a glance, the woman takes in my Deerfield Academy tee shirt and gives me a look I recognize as vaguely different from the look she would give anyone else. I find myself suddenly self-conscious in a way and in a kind of place I had never been self-conscious before. I didn't notice the next change in her expression or the sudden thickness about the air. Nor would I have considered it possible that the first wish of my life had come true when the tall kid behind me, about my age-though he wasn't wearing a Deerfield tee shirt-shoved in front of me.

Then I got it. This was a robbery. "What do you want, the money?" she asked. Her voice sounded scared, high-keyed voice, like a voice that had tried long and hard to be pretty. Who could hate this awkward ugly girl? I got a new, paternal feeling, as though I wanted to be leaned on, to give the poor creature a hug, claws or not. And she must have sensed it, for she looked at me as though for help.

Oh no, honey, I thought. Don't look at me. Oh shit. Now you've got him looking at me. Now I was the center of attention. I felt hot, embarrassed. I was no longer young enough to be spared by adult bullies, I knew. I looked at least something like a man and that would earn me respect enough from other men to get beat up. I was disturbed by how quickly I resigned myself to my fate. Oh well, I thought. So I would end in a gas station outside of Deerfield, splattered across Twinkies and cigarettes. Would they just wipe the blood off and resell the Twinkies and cigarettes? I wondered. I'd always hoped if I had to die a catastrophic death that it'd make CNN or Tom Brokaw. That I'd be in a video montage with the other victims, set to the Beatles' "Let it Be." But I'd be lucky if this made the local news. "Boy killed in middle of nowhere." And I had gotten so close to Deerfield too, so close to the place I had imagined as a beginning. Oh well, I thought.

But then, mustering courage or blinded by stupidity, I stepped forward. I somehow pretended not to notice what had happened. I had made a point to stare at the slurpy machine the whole time and thought maybe the robber'd think I hadn't noticed what his business had been crowding in front of me. He hadn't said 'this is a heist' or anything. He'd just lifted his shirt-which was still lifted-and shown her the gun.

"How do you get to Deerfield?" I asked. She glanced at my shirt and gave me a quizzical look.

"91 North, exit 24." Her voice was steadier this time. She knew well enough. This kind of thing happens at this kind of place. I would live. She would still be chewing her gum when the boy left. And by the time she responded he had left. She was already calling the police. And it occurred to me only then that I would walk away.

And so, slipping out the door, into the car, onto the freeway, on, to Deerfield-I did.

Last week, I called twenty people I didn't know in Franklin County, Massachusetts, told them I was from Deerfield Academy, and asked them, among other things, what my gender was.

I caught people at the end of their day at the end of the week on a hot Friday in May. Every person on the other end must've been tired; the person on this end was. And had I been selling vinyl siding or asking their opinion on the state of healthcare in the county, folks might've reacted differently than they did. But to a kid from Deerfield Academy people were polite, often amused, and surprisingly loquacious on the phone. Without prompts, several people went beyond my questions and told me other things in the answering. About families and work and their day's errands. I intended only to "survey" people, but in the end it hardly sufficed to call them 'respondents.' They seemed so much like folks I could know.

I was conducting my survey to settle an old score with my mother. You see, I have a 'unique' voice. 'Unique' is my descriptor of choice. Other people prefer to call it 'high-pitched,' 'twangy,' 'excitable,' 'girlish.' No one else in my family really has my voice or can reach my pitch. In my early teens, I argued feverishly about this with my mother.

And to this day the woman insists that my voice has changed and that the change has been for the better 'in a way.' I can almost get her to admit when I crescendo during an argument or telling a story, that she really doesn't love this voice only a mother could love. But she is a kindly woman, my mother. She tells me that my voice is masculine… enough. I laugh. She laughs. But she won't concede that I-since puberty-have been, for the only time perhaps, RIGHT. We are an arguing type family and my voice is a battle I intended to win.

So when my Statistics teacher, Mrs. Henry, announced that one option for our end-of-the-year Senior Culminating Experience was to statistically prove a hypothesis, one option presented itself like, appropriately, 'a firebell in the night.' I, Brett Masters, statistician, would demonstrate that to a statistical majority of human ears, mine is an unnatural voice. More specifically, a majority of randomly selected people from the phonebook would mistake me for a woman on the phone! At last, a victory in an argument with my mother!

So I called twenty people and, hoping not to weird them out, asked four questions: "What is your favorite color? What is the capital of Michigan? What is my gender? What is the weather like today?"

The old man who answered D. Walton's phone was 79 years old and suffering from Alzheimer's. "It's like having slides out of order in your head," he said. D. Walton-maybe that's who he was-graduated from the University of Michigan in 1952; but he couldn't pin down Michigan's capital. In the list of cities he rattled off, he passed over Lansing. At the end of our conversation, I felt obliged to tell him the answer.

"Gimme a hint," he said. It starts with an L. He was surprised it really was Lansing. "I should've known that," he laughed.

To the weather, D. said "it's a lovely summer day." D.'s favorite color was green.

D. thought I was a woman.

It's strange what you find yourself grateful for learning at Deerfield. And from whom. It was, I realize, a like-kind tribute to the irony of this place. By the end of my two years here, I was no longer asking perfect strangers where to go; I was asking perfect strangers who I am…and getting some part of them in return.

Two nights ago I went with four friends-my community service group-to the Whately Truck Stop Diner after curfew to celebrate graduation and endings and beginnings and all of that.

For five terms we had gone to Greenfield to tutor Moldovan immigrant children living in a housing project. We had had snowball fights and real ones, brought along pumpkins for carving, played parent and sibling and brought donuts. By my calculation, we and the little hellions consumed approximately 270 Dunkin Donuts, 82 cups of coffee and 14 scones in the course of a year. And, as is intended with these kinds of projects, we grew as people. Collectively by about 25 pounds. But in other ways too

To the diner Thursday night, I brought along a borrowed digital camera, got a large bellied man with an Elvis haircut to take our picture and then went around the table to record the kind of videos you always wish you had of friends. I asked what it was each of us wanted. Nobody could decide what to say. My video is rather mostly of the silence that hung after the question and which, somehow, said it all.

Ultimately Mari decided she wanted an omelet. Rachel got chicken fingers. Wynn went with the fries and a cup of decaf. Mrs. Ellis got a waffle with whipped cream. And me, I got a plateful of syrup. First with pancakes then with someone's leftover piece of toast and a couple of home fries. Later we split a coffee malted, making a celebration out of an ordinary element of a Deerfield night.

We planned a roadtrip-one of many-we probably won't take to Oregon and talked about senior parties in Greenwich and the Hamptons. We made faces, wore spoons on our noses, and sculpted marvelous heaps out of our dishes and napkins. We laughed at what we said and at what we had done.

But the real bonding came because I had a song stuck in my head. Copacabana. For a week I had hummed it, whistled and sang it to my and my roommate's distress. By the end of the week it had to stop. So when we arrived back from the diner at 1:00am on Friday morning, we held an exorcism. We started singin and didn't stop singin till security came to take us back to our dorms. In the orange light of the Health Center's loading dock Mari sang, Rachael taped and Wynn and I danced the tango. Mrs. Ellis hugged us. This was not the last time we would see each other but it was the last of something.

That is what Deerfield has given me. In a few hours, we'll all be gone. Up Albany Road, onto freeways and away. Such is life. Pulled together, then apart again. Passing through a gas station on my way here I was indifferent. I leave, utterly enamored of your lives.